Philippines: The shakedown state

["Ulhas Joglekar" <ulhasj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Volume 18 - Issue 01, Jan. 06 - 19, 2001
India's National Magazine on indiaserver.com
from the publishers of THE HINDU

WORLD AFFAIRS
The shakedown state

The mafia as government in the Philippines.
WALDEN BELLO

THE televised drama of the impeachment trial of President Joseph Estrada has
transfixed the Philippines in the last few weeks. The trial and the events
leading up to it have, in fact, been a veritable course in the realities of
Philippine politics - even for Filipinos themselves. Ever since a close
political ally of President Joseph Estrada, a powerful provincial politician
named Chavit Singson, alleged over two months ago that he had delivered to
the President 400 million pesos (about Rs.375 million) worth of the take
from the illegal numbers game called jueteng, the nation has been forced to
absorb one lesson after another, most of them rather unpleasant.
One of the most important lessons was driven home to me by a friend from
Colombia who has been following the events unfolding in Manila. "In
Colombia, the mafia is stronger than the government," he told me. "But you
know, we still are luckier than you Filipinos." When I asked why, he said,
"Because the mafia is the government in your country."
The great German sociologist Max Weber once defined the state as the
institution that has a legitimate monopoly over the use of force. This
definition is inadequate when it comes to the Philippines, where the state
maintains as well a monopoly or near monopoly over illegitimate services.
Crime and corruption are prominent features of governments the world over,
but in the normal state, the sources of corruption are forces that subvert
the machinery of government from without. The mafia is not indigenous to the
government; it corrupts and subverts public officials from the outside.
In the Philippines, on the other hand, organised crime external to the
government apparatus has been rare. Of course, small-time crooks and
gangsters have always existed outside the officialdom. Syndicates are,
however, another thing. Syndicates - whether in gambling, drugs, or
kidnapping - are unthinkable without the central organising role played by
government officials and politicians.
Even before the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos (1972-86), the pattern was
for local or regional politicians to absorb petty criminals or toughs into
their warlord bands, to be used to muscle into, control, and expand
lucrative sub rosa activities such as illegal gambling, prostitution, or
protection rackets, which served as additional mechanisms to squeeze the
economic surplus from the citizenry that could be deployed for increasingly
expensive electoral struggles.
The reign of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s and early 1980s was another
important step in the "mafiasation" of government. The loss of competitive
politics at the national, regional, and local levels led to the erosion of
the already inadequate checks that the government machinery posed to
regional and local political clans bent on expanding their access to the
social surplus via criminal methods. Marcos-linked political clans were able
to bring to a new level - the provincial and in some cases the regional -
the organisation and control of activities like jueteng, prostitution, and
drugs.
AT the same time, the expansion and centralisation of the central
administrative machinery that marked the Marcos years opened up tremendous
opportunities for economic mobility for middle-class or lower-middle-class
bureaucrats. With the traditional elites maintaining tight control over
land and the private sector, the state became the choice arena for
entrepreneurship by restive and ambitious elements from the more modest
classes. Syndicates or Sindicatos not only flourished in the traditional
cesspools of corruption like the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the
Department of Public Works and Highways but emerged in other agencies such
as those on top of agrarian reform, energy, education, and natural
resources.
The economic crisis that brought economic growth to virtually zero from 1983
to 1993 made the government's position even more attractive as a site of
private capital accumulation, despite the personal probity of the top people
in government like Presidents Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos. Indeed, it
was under Aquino that a government reorganisation was undertaken that,
unwittingly, created a massive new site of graft. The agency promoting the
exploitation of the country's natural resources was joined to that
responsible for protecting the environment to form the new Department of the
Environment and Natural Resources. The upshot was the creation of tremendous
opportunities for money-making via the sale of environmental permits and
timber licences to loggers, mining firms, and other private sector entities
that had no intention of complying with environmental laws. Solidly
entrenched, the mafia was able to thwart efforts at reform by progressive
officials until, under the Estrada administration, it finally secured the
top leadership posts in the agency.
THE consequences of the massive expansion of the security forces under
Marcos were similarly explosive. Many in the uniformed elite either lent
themselves out as enforcers for local or national cronies of the dictator or
carved out new illegal sources of income to supplement salaries that, more
often than not, failed to match their new political role and status. By the
time the Marcos regime ended, not a few officers had discovered that their
command over men and firepower could be translated into successful
entepreneurship in the form of kidnapping the rich - especially rich
Chinese - for ransom. Why, they reasoned, should this extremely profitable
business be left to petty gangsters? With the perquisites of command and
payoffs from politicians diminishing after the 1986 People Power Revolution
that dislodged Marcos, and with the economic crisis deepening under the
succeeding Aquino administration, the organisation of kidnappings moved
higher and higher up the chain of command of the military and the police.
Ordinary gangsters could never mount the sophisticated operations that
involved getting inside knowledge of the net worth of prospective targets
from within the banking system. Indeed, when regular gangsters sought to
organise independently of the military and the police, they found out the
hard way that the men in uniform would brook no competition. Some observers
contend that this was the significance of the total rub-out of the upstart
Kuratong Baleleng Gang a few years back, an operation carried out by
security elites closely associated with the then Vice-President Estrada,
like Panfilo Lacson, now the country's top police officer.
FROM a sociological point of view, the most interesting item to come out of
the revelations about the division of the spoils of the jueteng gambling
racket is that the main project of the Estrada administration was to
centralise crime under the presidency. Under Estrada, the most profitable
criminal activities like jueteng were to be rationalised, with a sub rosa
bureaucracy stretching from the President to the smallest jueteng collector
paralleling and intertwining at key points with the formal hierarchy of
government. What was exposed in the jueteng scandal was probably only the
tip of the iceberg. Were the worlds of prostitution, drugs, and kidnapping
also on the way to becoming equally centralised under Estrada? Many Fil
ipinos are convinced they were, and are awaiting revelations about the
drug-related financial take of the now-impeached President that might
surface in the Senate trial.
Had the Estrada project not been disrupted, the President would have become
the apex of both the state and the underworld. This was the real Estrada
Revolution - and Filipinos had thought the man was stupid!
Removing Estrada from office will probably be only the first step in
decriminalising the Philippine state. For what Filipinos are up against is a
disease that is far advanced and in varying degrees of being
institutionalised centrally. Which is why it is important that the next
chief executive must be above suspicion when it comes to the question of
ties to the underworld. The main reason many people are apprehensive about
Vice-President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo assuming office is that she is the
godmother of the child of a man, Bong Pineda, who has been tagged one of
the country's top illegal gambling lords. Ritual kinship bespeaks extremely
close personal ties, and we Filipinos know that we cannot kick out Estrada
only to make way for somebody who might complete the 'mafiasation' of the
Philippine state.
Dr. Walden Bello is executive director of Focus on the Global South, a
research, analysis, and advocacy programme of the Chulalongkorn University
Social Research Institute, and Professor of Sociology and Public
Administration at the University of the Philippines.

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